“Cultural theorist superstar Slavoj Žižek re-teams with director Sophie Fiennes (The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema) for another wildly entertaining romp through the crossroads of cinema and philosophy. With infectious zeal and a voracious appetite for popular culture, Žižek literally goes inside some truly epochal movies, all the better to explore and expose how they reinforce prevailing ideologies. As the ideology that undergirds our cinematic fantasies is revealed, striking associations emerge: What hidden Catholic teachings lurk at the heart of The Sound of Music? What are the fascist political dimensions of Jaws? Taxi Driver, Zabriskie Point, The Searchers, The Dark Knight, John Carpenter’s They Live (“one of the forgotten masterpieces of the Hollywood Left”), Titanic, Kinder Eggs, verité news footage, Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” and propaganda epics from Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia all inform Žižek’s stimulating, provocative and often hilarious psychoanalytic-cinematic rant.”
Tag: Culture
“Peter Joseph is a director, writer, producer, editor, composer and creator of the Zeitgeist movies series. He is an independent filmmaker who has written, directed, narrated, scored and produced three non-commercial, self-produced and freely-distributed documentary films: Zeitgeist: The Movie, Zeitgeist: Addendum and Zeitgeist: Moving Forward. He is also the founder of “The Zeitgeist Movement”, which is a social sustainability organization with members now in nearly every country. His work with The Movement is now a large part of his daily activities — giving lectures and helping to produce relevant media/materials to spread the interest for a new social system. In this talk, Peter Joseph examines todays economy and reflects our environmental misalignment and the value war.”
“Immortal Technique at the conference Activism in The Age of Mass Incarceration from Dec 4, 2012 featuring Dr. Cornel West, Immortal Technique & Schomburg Center Director Khalil Gibran Muhammad.”
❝ New York City, not-too-distant-future: Eric Packer, a 28 year-old finance golden boy dreaming of living in a civilization ahead of this one, watches a dark shadow cast over the firmament of the Wall Street galaxy, of which he is the uncontested king. As he is chauffeured across midtown Manhattan to get a haircut at his father’s old barber, his anxious eyes are glued to the yuan’s exchange rate: it is mounting against all expectations, destroying Eric’s bet against it. Eric Packer is losing his empire with every tick of the clock. Meanwhile, an eruption of wild activity unfolds in the city’s streets. Petrified as the threats of the real world infringe upon his cloud of virtual convictions, his paranoia intensifies during the course of his 24-hour cross-town odyssey. Packer starts to piece together clues that lead him to a most terrifying secret: his imminent assassination. ❞ [Official Site]
❝ Riding across Manhattan in a stretch limo in order to get a haircut, a 28-year-old billionaire asset manager’s day devolves into an odyssey with a cast of characters that start to tear his world apart. ❞ [IMDb]
based on the novel by Don DeLillo
“Media that spy on and data-mine the public are capable of destroying humanity’s most precious freedom: freedom of thought. Ensuring that media remain structured to support rather than suppress individual freedom and civic virtue requires us to achieve specific free technology and free culture goals. Our existing achievements in these directions are under assault from companies trying to bottleneck human communications or own our common culture, and states eager to control their subjects’ minds. In this talk–one of a series beginning with “The dotCommunist Manifesto” and “Die Gedanken Sind Frei”–I offer some suggestions about how the Free World should meet the challenges of the next decade.”
❝ Here anthropologist David Graeber presents a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom: he shows that before there was money, there was debt. For more than 5,000 years, since the beginnings of the first agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods—that is, long before the invention of coins or cash. It is in this era, Graeber argues, that we also first encounter a society divided into debtors and creditors.
Graeber shows that arguments about debt and debt forgiveness have been at the center of political debates from Italy to China, as well as sparking innumerable insurrections. He also brilliantly demonstrates that the language of the ancient works of law and religion (words like “guilt,” “sin,” and “redemption”) derive in large part from ancient debates about debt, and shape even our most basic ideas of right and wrong. We are still fighting these battles today without knowing it. ❞
❝ Blending cutting-edge ideas with incisive spiritual insights, Evolutionaries is the first popular presentation of an emerging school of thought called “evolutionary spirituality.” Carter Phipps, the former executive editor of EnlightenNext magazine, asserts that evolution is not only a scientific but also a spiritual idea in a book whose message has the power to bring new meaning and purpose to life as we know it. Readers will be fascinated and enlightened by Evolutionaries, a book which Deepak Chopra, the world-renowned author of The Seven Spiritual Laws of Superheroes, Jesus, and Buddha, says “is going to help create a worldview that will influence our vision of the future direction of evolution and also our role in consciously participating in it. ❞
“A city teenager moves to a small town where rock music and dancing have been banned, and his rebellious spirit shakes up the populace.”
❝ The term Cosmism was introduced by Tsiolokovsky and other Russian Cosmists around 1900. Goertzel’s “Cosmist Manifesto” gives it new life and a new twist for the 21st century. Cosmism, as Goertzel presents it, is a practical philosophy for the posthuman era. Rooted in Western and Eastern philosophy as well as modern technology and science, it is a way of understanding ourselves and our universe that makes sense now, and will keep on making sense as advanced technology exerts its transformative impact as the future unfolds. Among the many topics considered are AI, nanotechnology, uploading, immortality, psychedelics, meditation, future social structures, psi phenomena, alien and cetacean intelligence and the Singularity. The Cosmist perspective is shown to make plain old common sense of even the wildest future possibilities. ❞
Eben Moglen (of the Software Freedom Conservancy) @ Law of the Commons Conference, National Lawyers Guild, Seattle University 2009
Watch Full Film Free on YouTube
“Exactly one year and a day after the initial Wall Street bailout, Michael Moore (SICKO, FAHRENHEIT 9/11) looks at the global financial crisis and the U.S. economy during the transition between the incoming Obama Administration and the outgoing Bush Administration. In standard Moore fashion, he mockingly draws attention to the Wall Street and Government decisions that have enabled what he calls “the biggest robbery in the history of this country.””
Computers & Society, NYU. Following is the foreword, by Douglas Alexander, to Rushkoff’s paper on the same topic:
“The internet has become an integral part of our lives because it is interactive. That means people are senders of information, rather than simply passive receivers of ‘old’ media. Most importantly of all, we can talk to each other without gatekeepers or editors. This offers exciting possibilities for new social networks, which are enabled – but not determined – by digital technology.
In the software industry, the open source movement emphasises collective cooperation over private ownership. This radical idea may provide the biggest challenge to the dominance of Microsoft. Open source enthusiasts have found a more efficient way of working by pooling their knowledge to encourage innovation.
All this is happening at a time when participation in mainstream electoral politics is declining in many Western countries, including the US and Britain. Our democracies are increasingly resembling old media, with fewer real opportunities for interaction.
What, asks Douglas Rushkoff in this original essay for Demos, would happen if the ‘source code’ of our democratic systems was opened up to the people they are meant to serve? ‘An open source model for participatory, bottom-up and emergent policy will force us to confront the issues of our time,’ he answers.
That’s a profound thought at a time when governments are recognising the limits of centralised political institutions. The open source community recognises that solutions to problems emerge from the interaction and participation of lots of people, not by central planning.
Rushkoff challenges us all to participate in the redesign of political institutions in a way which enables new solutions to social problems to emerge as the result of millions interactions. In this way, online communication may indeed be able to change offline politics.”
❝ These are strange times indeed. While they continue to command so much attention in the mainstream media, the ‘battles’ between old and new modes of distribution, between the pirate and the institution of copyright, seem to many of us already lost and won. We know who the victors are. Why then say any more?
Because waves of repression continue to come: lawsuits are still levied against innocent people; arrests are still made on flimsy pretexts, in order to terrify and confuse; harsh laws are still enacted against filesharing, taking their place in the gradual erosion of our privacy and the bolstering of the surveillance state. All of this is intended to destroy or delay inexorable changes in what it means to create and exchange our creations. If STEAL THIS FILM II proves at all useful in bringing new people into the leagues of those now prepared to think ‘after intellectual property’, think creatively about the future of distribution, production and creativity, we have achieved our main goal.
It has been an exciting and demanding year for us and we really hope you’ll enjoy the work we’ve done. It would not have been possible without the thousands of donations you have given us. We have a plan for the future and if you would like to continue to support us, go here. Thank you. ❞
❝ In the early 1960s, computers haunted the American popular imagination. Bleak tools of the cold war, they embodied the rigid organization and mechanical conformity that made the military-industrial complex possible. But by the 1990s—and the dawn of the Internet—computers started to represent a very different kind of world: a collaborative and digital utopia modeled on the communal ideals of the hippies who so vehemently rebelled against the cold war establishment in the first place.
From Counterculture to Cyberculture is the first book to explore this extraordinary and ironic transformation. Fred Turner here traces the previously untold story of a highly influential group of San Francisco Bay–area entrepreneurs: Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth network. Between 1968 and 1998, via such familiar venues as the National Book Award–winning Whole Earth Catalog, the computer conferencing system known as WELL, and, ultimately, the launch of the wildly successful Wired magazine, Brand and his colleagues brokered a long-running collaboration between San Francisco flower power and the emerging technological hub of Silicon Valley. Thanks to their vision, counterculturalists and technologists alike joined together to reimagine computers as tools for personal liberation, the building of virtual and decidedly alternative communities, and the exploration of bold new social frontiers.
Shedding new light on how our networked culture came to be, this fascinating book reminds us that the distance between the Grateful Dead and Google, between Ken Kesey and the computer itself, is not as great as we might think. ❞
This is the real big picture y’all, a vision of the future & where all this technology is going & what humans need to do to become better role models for robots. He explores what’s really important in our lives & why our current approaches to technology might be insufficient to allow its full potential to come to fruition. ♥ Neonn
“In this talk, Pablos dares you to imagine the possibilities in what once seemed impossible: a harmonious co-existence of humans and robots: Robots taking over your jobs and why they should; how this can trigger fear in humans and why it shouldn’t; redefining happiness; solving world problems like eliminating disease; a personal narrative of parenting that will bring you to your knees; and the responsibility of humans in all of this.”
This film was very important for me during my original awakening. It sent me on a long journey of discovery studying the true nature of our civilization. This film is pre-TZM, and deals with things that are not in the specific purview of TZM. It’s a controversial film that isn’t particularly relevant to the rest of Peter Joseph’s work, but if you want to peek behind the veil of the mythology of modern society & you’ve got the stomach for it, check this out. 💜 Neonn
“Zeitgeist: The Movie (2007) is a treatment on Mythology and Belief in society today presenting uncommon perspectives of common cultural issues. Chapter 1 presents historical data relating to the astronomical/astrological origins of the Judeo-Christian theology. Chapter 2 presents a alternative view of the events of Sept. 11th 2001. Chapter 3 presents a shotgun tour through the subjects of Central Banking, War Pretexts, Banking Panics, the Military Industrial Complex, Media Culture and ultimately the mental neurosis and deadly addiction known as Power.”
brilliant segment from “You are All Diseased”
❝ From the author of the bestselling “Art and Physics” comes a new book with breathtaking implications. Making remarkable connections across a wide range of subjects, including neurology, anthropology, history, and religion, “Leonard Shlain” argues that the development of alphabetic literacy itself reinforced the human brain’s left hemisphere — linear, abstract, predominantly masculine — at the expense of its right — holistic, concrete, visual, feminine. “The Alphabet Versus the Goddess” charts the connection between alphabetic literacy and monotheism; patriarchy and misogyny, and tracks the correlations between the rise and fall of literacy and the status of women in society, mythology, and religion. ❞
“Join Terence McKenna, author, explorer and philosopher for a think along deconstruction of the deepening worldwide weirdness. With his characteristic hope and humor, McKenna examined time and its mysteries, the nature of language, the techniques of ecstasy, high technology and virtual cyberspace, the role of hallucinogenic plants in shamanism and the evolution of human cultures, and the foundations of post-modern spirituality. The lecture and discussion was didactic, syncretic, challenging, eclectic, eidetic and irreverent intellectual adventure.”
❝ How does our fascination with technology intersect with the religious imagination? In TechGnosis—a cult classic now updated and reissued with a new afterword—Erik Davis argues that while the realms of the digital and the spiritual may seem worlds apart, esoteric and religious impulses have in fact always permeated (and sometimes inspired) technological communication. Davis uncovers startling connections between such seemingly disparate topics as electricity and alchemy; online roleplaying games and religious and occult practices; virtual reality and gnostic mythology; programming languages and Kabbalah. The final chapters address the apocalyptic dreams that haunt technology, providing vital historical context as well as new ways to think about a future defined by the mutant intermingling of mind and machine, nightmare and fantasy. ❞
❝ The most virulent viruses today are composed of information. In this information-driven age, the easiest way to manipulate the culture is through the media. A hip and caustically humorous McLuhan for the ’90s, culture watcher Douglas Rushkoff now offers a fascinating expose of media manipulation in today’s age of instant information. ❞
“Mckenna discusses the evolutionary theories surrounding our emergence out of the hominid line, how the development of human egos has been disempowering and how global values based on archaic systems can be recognised as the gaian mind of the planet through the medium of the internet. The gaia hypothesis now has a solid scientific underpinning, inspired by James Lovelocks work”
❝ In a vivid journalistic portrait of the underground trendsetters of the 1990s, Rushkoff ventures headlong into cyberspace–the weird and unmapped terrain of hackers, smart drugs, virtual reality, cyberliterature, and technoshamans ❞
❝ Jane Pratt discusses Rave culture with the NASA Crew (DB, Scotto, ODI, Nai, Spike), Researcher Dr Julie Holland, & anti-drug filmmaker Shane Solerno. Lots of NASA regulars in the audience. ❞
“Manufacturing Consent explores the political life and ideas of world-renowned linguist, intellectual and political activist Noam Chomsky. Through a collage of biography, archival material and various graphics and illustrations, Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick’s 22-award-winning documentary highlights Chomsky’s probing analysis of mass media and his critique of the forces at work behind the daily news.”
❝ R. Buckminster Fuller is regarded as one of the most important figures of the 20th century, renowned for his achievements as an inventor, designer, architect, philosopher, mathematician, and dogged individualist. Perhaps best remembered for the Geodesic Dome and the term “Spaceship Earth,” his work and his writings have had a profound impact on modern life and thought.
Critical Path is Fuller’s master work–the summing up of a lifetime’s thought and concern–as urgent and relevant as it was upon its first publication in 1981. Critical Path details how humanity found itself in its current situation–at the limits of the planet’s natural resources and facing political, economic, environmental, and ethical crises.
The crowning achievement of an extraordinary career, Critical Path offers the reader the excitement of understanding the essential dilemmas of our time and how responsible citizens can rise to meet this ultimate challenge to our future. ❞
❝ A Lama Foundation Book. Describes one man’s transformation upon his acceptance of the principles of Yoga and gives a modern restatement of the importance of the spiritual side of man’s nature. Illustrated. ❞